Saturday, December 22, 2007

Everybody loves my beard, it is bio-engineered...

Have been lazy about blogging, so the dates are really only approximations. Nonetheless, I did basically manage to grow a reasonable beard for VISTA Lab within two weeks (see my previous post).

DAY 11

Getting nice and bushy here...

DAY 12

But wait! Is it getting sparser?

DAY 13

Or is it a trick of the light?

DAY 13 (with my hair smooshed)

Confession time: I have many bad habits. Two of them are trichotillomania and trichophagy. Which means that after a while I began to pull out my beard hairs by the roots and eat them.

DAY 14

You: But Yi-Sheng, that's really gross!

DAY 15

Yi-Sheng: But it's just social grooming! And the chewy skin bits at the end are so yummy!

DAY 16

And I wonder why I'm still single...

DAY 17

Looking back, it's around now that my right muttonchop became barer than my left muttonchop. Next time I must practise ambidextrous chewing.

But I went a little overboard after the production. I allowed my itchy fingers to go crazy. And I pulled at the sides of my upper lip to the extent that I ended up with a little Hitler moustache:

DAY 20

But now that the production was over, I could rip out my Gillette Mach 3.0 and -

DAY 20 (aftermath)

Look! Now I have a manly-manly chin, but I no longer have to put up with the freakish ability to taste my own hair! (Seriously, I don't like kissing guys with hairy lips, so inasmuch as I thought I looked reasonably good with my moustache, I just felt unsexy. As a gay man, I try my damnedest to be the kind of man I'd want to fuck.)

My capoeira friends think it's hot and so does my mum (who's been away in China over most of the beard-growing era, and comments that it makes me look a little less "ar kwa". Whatever rocks your boat, momma). People keep mistakenly calling it a goatee, when it is (according to beards.org), a chin curtain:

It's also called a Donegal, and is worn by married Amish men. Ooh, hold on, Wikipedia says if it doesn't cover the entire chin, it's technically a chinstrap.

The chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus) is one of the most aggressive of the penguin species, known for its harsh call (hence its other name, stonecracker penguin) and its habit of frequently tobogganing on its belly. Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins at Central Park Zoo in New York made headlines a few years ago for forming a loving same-sex pair-bond and hatching an egg together. A controversial children's book was written about it, celebrating non-traditional families. Then after six years, Roy left Silo for a female named Scrappy. Bisexual ho.

DAY 25 - TODAY

Back to Planet Yish: I'm still hazy about maintenance and trimming, and I'll shave it off the moment a budak cantik objects to it, but I am rather pleased by its incongruity.